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Clams Minced

Clams Minced is a baked clam dish with minced clams, butter, flour, cream, spices, egg yolks, and breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Clams Minced

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the clams

  1. Open 25 clams, keeping half shells intact. Wash the clams, cut off the heads, and mince the entire clams very fine.

  2. Put the minced clams over the fire to stew in their strained juice.

  3. Peel and thinly slice an onion.

  4. In a pan, heat 2 ounces of butter and sauté the onion until it begins to turn yellow.

Make the filling

  1. Stir in 2 ounces of flour, the minced clams, and their broth, along with ½ pint of cream or milk.

  2. Add ¼ teaspoon of coarse sea salt, ⅛ teaspoon of grated nutmeg, ⅛ teaspoon of white pepper, and a dash of cayenne.

  3. Mix until thick.

  4. Let the mixture simmer for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally to prevent burning.

  5. Remove from heat and stir in the yolks of 3 eggs.

Fill and bake

  1. Spoon the mixture into the clam shells, arrange them on a baking pan, and dust with bread crumbs.

  2. Top each clam with a small piece of butter.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Clam + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together840 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Clams
Provide the main savoury flavour and the minced body of the filling.
Butter
Enriches the onion base and adds richness and browning to the topping.
Flour
Thickens the mixture into a stable, spoonable filling as it cooks.
Cream or milk
Adds moisture and richness, giving the filling a smooth, creamy body.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help set the filling once it is baked.

The step that matters

Simmer the filling while stirring. Flour-thickened cream scorches easily on the bottom of a pan. Frequent stirring over gentle heat keeps it smooth and prevents burning, and the flour needs this time to cook out its raw taste and thicken fully.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clam, butter, flour, cream, nutmeg, bread, egg):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clam, butter, flour, cream, nutmeg, bread, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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